Field Harmonies series — 3 Paintings by Arnaud Quercy

Field Harmonies

What happens when twelve seconds of a café terrace are asked to hold a chord?

A first rule takes the fragment and returns a fundamental, along with twelve weighted pitches — a hierarchy, sometimes clear, more often faint. A second rule assigns each pitch its colour. The canvas executes both to the end.

The chord itself is not returned by the rule: it is read. And the canvases in this series show that there is more than one way of reading it.

In Saint-Sulpice Station, the four notes of the chord are exactly the four pitches the rule ranks highest, in that order — the reading follows the ranking. In Bus 29, a highly ranked pitch is left out, and the chord tightens against the ranking. In Stirring the Ice, where the material ranks almost nothing, what is posed is posed by the painter alone.

Nothing goes from the sound to the painting. Two domains that nothing brings together are bound by a rule that was posed, and what appears on the canvas is what that rule produces. What remains is the gap between the rule and its execution: it belongs to the work.